Information & Culture

SubmissionsInformation & Culture: A Journal of History welcomes submissions of research articles. Authors may submit a complete manuscript or may contact the editor with a proposal. You are encouraged to consult the journal’s home page, which gives an overview of the material published in Information & Culture.

Prospective authors should familiarize themselves with the broad topics covered by the journal (found on the about page) as well as the submission requirements and the peer review process. We expect authors to submit completed articles following all guidelines below. Papers that do not follow these guidelines will not be accepted for review. Please note, we do not accept papers that are currently under consideration for publication with another journal.

Content Requirements

Interpretive. Good history is about interpretation. Each article must have a historical thesis that is bolstered by an appropriate line of argument and credible evidence that is appropriately cited. Papers are expected to follow the methods of high-quality academic historical scholarship. Articles that are merely descriptive will not be accepted for publication.

Information History. All articles must be primarily historical in nature and primarily about information. If the relevance of information to the manuscript theme is not immediately clear, the author should add text as necessary to clarify the relationship, and to place the submission in a larger body of scholarship.

Language. Should be written in Standard English. Word choice should be precise and syntax should be clear. Articles written in a language other than grammatically correct English at a high academic level will not be considered.

Manuscript Requirements

Manuscript. Articles should typically range from 6,000-10,000 words. Longer articles will be considered in the context of whether the topic and treatment merits the extra length, and whether the journal has the space. Shorter articles may also be considered under certain circumstances.

Abstract. The article’s abstract should be no longer than 100 words and should be independent from the body of the article. Care should be taken to craft a clear and compelling abstract. Authors should bear in mind that the abstract is the first thing that the reader and any potential reviewers will see.

Keywords. Authors are encouraged to provide three to five keywords that capture the manuscript’s salient points. Keywords should be listed on a separate line on the title page.

Reviewers. Authors should submit, along with the manuscript, the names of at least two potential reviewers with expertise in the topic.

Endnotes. All citations should be provided as endnotes. Endnotes should be placed in a Notes section following the body of the manuscript. For a sentence with citations, there should be only one callout for all references cited within that sentence, and with few exceptions, that callout should be placed at the end of the sentence. Endnotes must be formatted electronically in MS Word and conform to “Humanities Style” in The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. Notes should include all bibliographic information required by that style.

Acknowledgments. Acknowledgments are not required, but when included, should appear at the beginning of the Notes as an unnumbered endnote

Cover Sheet. Include a seperate page with article title, author name, mailing address, phone number, fax number, email address, and a 50-word biographical statement. For blind review purposes, do not include personal or institutional information on any page of the manuscript itself, including the abstract.

All text should be one and a half spaced, including headings, long quotations, endnotes, and captions

One-inch margins on all sides

Page numbers in the upper right margin

All copy aligned left; do not justify

Paragraphs indented five spaces (0.25”) with a single tab

An extra line of space should be inserted above and below extracts, subheads, and figure/table/image callouts, but not between paragraphs

One space only after each period at the end of a sentence

Include first name and/or initial(s) of all persons when referred to in the manuscript for the first time

Spell out the title of an organization when first referenced, with acronym in parentheses. Acronyms may be used in all subsequent references

Tables should be submitted as separate MS Word files

Photos and Illustrations

Permissions are required for all published images. Should the article be accepted for publication, it is the responsibility of the author to obtain official written permission to reprint an image from the copyright holder or owner, including preferred wording for crediting the source of the image. Any cost involved is the responsibility of the author.

Figure captions should always include a source attribution and a statement of permission to use the image. Images obtained at no cost should attribute the source “Courtesy of…” while permissions obtained for a fee should state the source and “Used by permission.”

All images (photos, maps, or illustrations) to be included with a manuscript should be noted in the cover letter.

Images should be submitted as separate files (one file per image). Images submitted in Word documents are not acceptable.

Each image file should be at least 300 dpi at the size at which it is to be published.

Grayscale images in TIFF format are preferred, but most standard formats will be accepted.

Figure callouts should be placed in the manuscript on a separate line as Figure X Here, or similar text.

Figure captions should be placed at the end of the manuscript, after the Notes section.

The editor will make the final determination as to which images, if any, will be published.

Special Notes and Recommendations:
Non-native English speakers preparing a manuscript for submission to Information & Culture may wish to utilize one of the many professional English language editing services that specialize in academic journal manuscript preparation. Clearly written manuscripts help editorial staff and peer reviewers better evaluate the paper for its content, reducing the time required for the review process and resulting in a more competitive submission overall.

Please note, however, that the use of editing services is at the author’s own expense and does not guarantee that the article will be selected for peer review or accepted for publication in Information & Culture.

Rethinking the Call for a US National Data Center in the 1960s: Privacy, Social Science Research, and Data Fragmentation Viewed from the Perspective of Contemporary Archival TheorybyChristopher Loughnane, and William Aspray

Rethinking the Call for a US National Data Center in the 1960s: Privacy, Social Science Research, and Data Fragmentation Viewed from the Perspective of Contemporary Archival Theory
Christopher Loughnane, William Aspray

“Crises” in Scholarly Communications? Insights from the Emergence of the Journal of Library History, 1947–1966

Maria Gonzalez and Patricia Galloway
p. 3-42

This study examines the first ten years of the journal now known as Information & Culture. Founded in 1966 as TheJournal of Library History, the Journal has been shaped according to the values, habits, and competencies that its contributors brought to changing circumstances so as to transform the Journal into an erudite interdisciplinary publication distant from its beginnings as a compendium of entertaining vignettes and didactic notes on the writing and uses of library history. Historical perspectives are used to frame various crises in scholarly communications that are treated chronologically as they confronted the Journal, drawing on archival sources, secondary sources, interviews, participant observation by Gonzalez, and close reading of the publication to construct a narrative about the Journal in its relation to higher education, scholarly publication, and professional and disciplinary developments in librarianship and companion fields under the increasing influence of technology on these fields. The characters, actions, and settings are interpreted through the sociological lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of social field, habitus, and multiple forms of actual and metaphorical capital request government.

Maria Elena Gonzalez, after a career in architecture and building, earned a PhD in Library and Information Science (2008) from the School of Information, University of Texas-Austin, and has taught in that field at Wayne State University and Rutgers University.

Patricia Galloway spent twenty years at the Mississippi Department of Archives and history before coming to teach courses on appraisal and digital archives at the School of Information, University of Texas-Austin. She holds PhDs in Comparative Literature (1973) and Anthropology (2004) from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Reading the Minor Forest Product bulletins of the Philippine Bureau of Forestry: a case study of the role of reference works in the American Empire of the early twentieth century

Brendan Luyt
p. 43-66

Empires are built around the control of information with an often-overlooked aspect of empire building being the construction of tools of reference. These tools incorporate with them in summary form the multiplicity of inscriptions that are a product of the empire’s epistemological operations. In order to shed some light on this face of empire, this article focuses on three readings of the minor forest products bulletins published by the Bureau of Forestry of the Philippines in the early twentieth century. The first of these sees the bulletins as demonstrating the Bureau of Forestry’s mastery of the forest domain in the face of natural and human resistance to its work. In the second reading, we can see the Bureau’s efforts to create and assist “botanical entrepreneurs” capable and willing to exploit forest products in an efficient manner. Finally, we can read the bulletins as particular manifestations of the botanical guide as a genre. In this case the bulletins created a series of “inscription clusters” that served to enhance the authority of the Bureau of Forestry as a mediator between users and the forests of the Philippines.

Brendan Luyt is Associate Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication & Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received both his MLIS and PhD degrees from the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. He also holds a MA in Political Science from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency and the Information Work of the Nineteenth-Century Surveillance State

Alan Bilansky
p. 67-84

Private security contractor for business and government, Allan Pinkerton acted centrally in early chapters of the history of the security state. The operative and the report, Pinkerton’s principal surveillance technologies, are analyzed here in relation to each other and in their historical development as information technology, drawing on Pinkerton’s fictionalized accounts of cases, secret reports and other Agency documents. Pinkerton management was consistently preoccupied with strict compliance of operatives, their deployment in a network, and the regular submission of reports. This study suggests information can lead to uncertainty and the surveillance state was and is compartmentalized, entrepreneurial, and other-than-public.

Alan Bilansky holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Democracy from Penn State and an MSLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he consults with faculty about technology and occasionally teaches informatics. He is currently at work on a book examining the information practices of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.

The Literature of American Library History, 2014 – 2015

Edward Goedeken
p. 85-120

This biennial review of the writings on the history of libraries, librarianship, and information surveys about 200 publications that were published in 2014 and 2015. The essay is divided into a number of specific sections including: academic and public libraries, biography, technical services, and the history of reading and publishing. It also contains a brief list of theses and dissertations that were completed in 2014 and 2015.

Edward A. Goedeken is Professor of Library Science and Collections Coordinator at the Iowa State University Library. Over the past twenty years he has maintained an ongoing bibliography of library history scholarship, and every two years crafts a review essay for Information & Culture on the most recent writings in this discipline.

Michelle Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical logic. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United States and Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized “Invest in a Girl” campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice. (Duke University Press)

The life and times of one of the foremost intellects of the twentieth century: Claude Shannon—the neglected architect of the Information Age, whose insights stand behind every computer built, email sent, video streamed, and webpage loaded. In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time.

Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost its Edge in Computing, by Marie Hicks, reviewed by Megan Finn

Marie Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. (MIT Press)

Beginning with the release of the Magnavox Odyssey and Pong in 1972, video games, whether played in arcades and taverns or in family rec rooms, became part of popular culture, like television. In fact, video games were sometimes seen as an improvement on television because they spurred participation rather than passivity. These “space-age pinball machines” gave coin-operated games a high-tech and more respectable profile. In Atari Age, Michael Newman charts the emergence of video games in America from ball-and-paddle games to hits like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, describing their relationship to other amusements and technologies and showing how they came to be identified with the middle class, youth, and masculinity. (MIT Press)

Around 1940, a New York City organization known as the Dance Notation Bureau (DNB) began a decades-long effort to promote a system known as “Labanotation.” Designed to capture the ephemeral, three-dimentional complexity of dance on the flat surface of paper, the DNB believed that Labanotation held the key to modernizing the art form. Focusing on the period between 1940 and 1975, this article catalogues the Dance Notation Bureau’s efforts to make dance both “literate” and “Scientific” and explores how these efforts contributed to broader transformations in the definitions of creativity, preservation, authorship and dance itself.

A Cost-Saving Machine: Computing at the German Allianz Insurance CompanyCorinna Schlombs

This article provides a close study of information processing at Allianz, a West German insurance company, in the two decades following World War II. It contributes an international perspective to the history of information by analyzing corporate information technology decisions outside the United States and by tracing exchanges about information technology between insurance managers in the United States and Germany. The article argues that Allianz managers, claiming that electronic information processing would reduce office operating costs, meticulously sought to document these savings to legitimate their computer acquisition in an otherwise adverse economic and political climate.

A History of Information in the United States since 1870James W. Cortada

This article summarizes the findings of a book-length study of how Americans have used information since the 1700s, with a primary emphasis on the post-1870 period. The author argues that residents of North America were extensive users of information in their work and in their public and private lives. Reasons are offered for that dependence on information: high levels of literacy, economic prosperity, open political system, and considerable personal freedom to do as one wanted. The article describes findings on information use in the private sector, public sector, and in private life, including the American experience using the Internet.

Using Historical Methods to Explore the Contribution of Information Technology to Regional Development in New ZealandJanet Toland and Pak Yoong

This article examines the role that information and communication technologies (ICTs) play in regional development and their relationship with factors such as regional learning, innovation, culture, and internal and external regional information networks. Historical methods are used to build up a picture of significant changes that have taken place within two contrasting regions of New Zealand between 1985 and 2005. The interdependent relationships between the development of hard ICT-based networks and regional social networks are explored.

The Octagonal Pavilion Library of Macao: A Study in UniquenessJingzhen Xie and Laura Reilly

Privately owned by the Macao Chamber of Commerce, the Octagonal Pavilion Library was the first free Chinese library service as well as the most used Chinese public library in Macao from its establishment in 1948 until the late twentieth century. With a total surface area of 1,130 square feet, it is possibly the smallest library in the world. Despite its diminutive size, its educational and cultural impact on the community make it unique. Its relationship to “the foreign-Chinese divide,” to Ho Yin (Macao’s most important twentieth-century historical figure), and to other libraries in Macao are of particular interest. Its architecture, classification system (centered on the Three People’s Principles), and non-technical operations in the current technical environment also make it a meaningful library service case study.